It was released the trailer of NU(I)T, artistic project joining different disciplines as film, performance art, music and poetry, ideated by the iconic, vibrant artist and beloved friend Alex Zapak aka The Countess, who is the founder of art movement The Cunt Rock Revolution, band and artistic collective later turned into The Countess and Cun$t Rock Revolution and the Bank of Imaginations Theatre. This project has previewed weeks ago in Berlin during the fashion week and featured the live performance of The Stooges. I am very pleased of talking about NU(I)T, arising from the creativity of a visionary artist as well as I am into all that, or rather I am as poem, “Poem for Nunzia” – which follows – Alex wrote and gave me as a gift. That is much more than a gift, it’s electricity, energy and its sharing, a value I celebrate. Hopefully I will tell you soon more about this marvelous project as well as new dates, not to be missed happenings to discover and enjoy The Countess.

Poem for Nunzia

“a catholic country
a childless mother
a hollow
Madonna
Hummed
With
hyms
Of doubt
And
spirit crucifixion
Bleeds for
A
Lust
Cause
The first
god
Mouth
For
A
Lost
Brainchild
Whose Paris
Thoughts and
second nature
Turned
The big boys
Into
Village tricksters
And a small
Sham
fallacy
Stiff with
Deluded
Supremacy
That
Lit the remedy
Unwritten in
Email s
Holey scriptures
Of
Freeze and
fires
And flies
And virtual
Frissons
For
The
Red bled
Flower hooligan
In fragrant prisons
With Tongue – tied
fantasies
Of other women.
The long
last
Tango
The
Strong
Fast
Bomb
Blasts
Family
breath
No butter
No bread
No grass fed
crystal meth
No glass
No lead
A wedding…
With
No wedding guess”

“a catholic country
a childless mother
a hollow
Madonna
Hummed
With
hyms
Of doubt
And
spirit crucifixion
Bleeds for
A
Lust
Cause
The first
god
Mouth
For
A
Lost
Brainchild
Whose Paris
Thoughts and
second nature
Turned
The big boys
Into
Village tricksters
And a small
Sham
fallacy
Stiff with
Deluded
Supremacy
That
Lit the remedy
Unwritten in
Email s
Holey scriptures
Of
Freeze and
fires
And flies
And virtual
Frissons
For
The
Red bled
Flower hooligan
In fragrant prisons
With Tongue – tied
fantasies
Of other women.
The long
last
Tango
The
Strong
Fast
Bomb
Blasts
Family
breath
No butter
No bread
No grass fed
crystal meth
No glass
No lead
A wedding…
With
No wedding guess”

Today I was on Facebook and I ran into a picture shared by a friend of mine coming from the LadyGaga Facebook profile who was got ready to watch herself as the Countess. I saw her outfit and it reminded me the real Countess, my dear friend Alex Zapak, renowned, iconic persona from the NYC downtown art scene (who is the founder of art movement The Cunt Rock Revolution, band and artistic collective later turned into The Countess and Cun$t Rock Revolution and the Bank of Imaginations Theatre), that realm Lady Gaga quoted as reference which influenced her art and music. As it teaches the legendary fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld: to use or rather combine at least eight different references it does not stands as copying. What does it happen instead when do you copy the name, the look, some music and the image of another underground artist? It does not happen anything. Why? Because of the mass ignorance, emphasized, a weird paradox, by the web, the unstoppable flux of information which is not supported by any consciousness, autonomous thinking, gives rise to ignorance, word I focus by considering is Latin root or rather “i-gnosco” which means “not-knowing”. Then the result arising from all that is to not knowing. And it has to be known the facts especially during this times where it lacks any sedimentation of knowledge (being basically visual, lasting for the time the following image deletes the previous, it’s a perpetual motion creating emptiness) and people exchange for “new”, “innovative”, “visionary”, a bad reinterpretation or worst copy of past or present.

The Cunt Rock Revolution

Alex Zapak aka The Countess

These thoughts arise from a picture, but I am sure I am not the only who sees and knows it. Considering the Lady Gaga issue, her “references” to underground culture is very known. She “quoted” through her work many artists as Orlan (who unsuccessfully started a legal action against her), Colette(famous New York artist who made a public appearance behind the shop-windows of Barney’s over one year ago that hosted an installation ideated by Lady Gaga), Anne Pigalleand many others. Underground artists, though they are brilliant naturally fail behind a corporate marketing company which is Lady Gaga. They are the weakest because as “Nostalgia”, the song by Readerswives, tells about, “there is no money in the underground”. That is in the status quo of contemporary times. Knowledge is not marketing is of and for all the ones, thus it’s important to tell that and it’s relevant on a cultural profile to know and recognize all that. Mainstream culture will be always the mainstream culture, focused on increasing the mass homologation, corresponding to ideas, actions, habits and last but not least consumes – strictly connected to consumerism culture -, drawing often inspiration from the underground culture which will be always out of this circuit, the mass culture. Nevertheless, the minds of people, their eyes travel, therefore it must be given them the chance to develop an autonomous, free thinking.

Alex Zapak aka The Countess, front-woman of band The Countess & Cun$t Revolution and brilliant performer artist has recently released a smashing music video of the new track she made “Lift up your skirt and fly”, featuring the patterns of her work: lyrical, poetic and punk-rock suggestions celebrating underground culture.

It will be held tonight at 9 pm in London at the Camden Purple Turtle club the live performance of brilliant, iconic singer and performer artist Alex Zapak aka The Countess and The Cun$t Rock Revolution, event created by Bank of Imagination Theatre, featuring smashing artists and musicians that represents a new chapter of Cunt Rock Revolution (C.C.R.) and its legendary performances. A not to be missed happening to enjoy art, music and the aristocracy of underground.

Art, poetry, free thinking and rock revolution features in the life and work by Alex Zapak aka The Countess, iconic musician having a marvelous voice and bright performer artist who founded The Countess and the Cunt Rock Revolution (C.R.R.) band in 2004, considered a genuine artistic movement, based on the principles of random synchronicity, the tradition of absurd, Dadaism, Fellini’s imagery, defying the woman and man stereotypes. I smile thinking to which extent this experience in terms of suggestions, aesthetics and sounds has borrowed and – badly – transposed in the pop culture or more precisely in the construction of Lady Gaga’ s persona of whose I broadly talked about time ago. The underground as cross-culture – though today it’s the genuine culture which makes think and emancipate the individual and its thinking, the one which makes open the mind as a whole like a parachute, is paradoxically underground, elitist phenomenon as the mass culture or rather all that has presented like that is often a load of persuasive, catchy, glossy disinformation, the nothingness putting forward or worse an artifice to maximize the ignorance and increase fear, fragility, the homologation of thinking, taste and action, appealing on the need of individual to be accepted, being part of a group, huge drama of human being, strictly connected to its giving up to freedom for getting a bit of safety – has its own aristocracy and Alex Zapak aka The Countess is the most brilliant representative: passion, talent, poetry, art, an ethic built day by day on her own skin, an autonomous thinking and a great romanticism – celebrated by me – paying homage above all to the freedom, the freedom of walking autonomously on a path, making, developing and sharing – as life is sharing -, a libertine and libertarian way of thinking which subverts the female stereotypes in a playful and joyful way, claiming its assertiveness and celebrating love and passion as agitators of human soul. That and much more results in the moving interview which follows where Alex Zapak, amazing, vibrant individual and eclectic artist told about herself with sincerity, modesty and a great generosity, talking about herself, her life and forthcoming projects under the sign of punk rock and the new Cunt Rock Revolution.

How did you start working in the realm of music and performance art?

“I think I was always doing performance art, I just didn’t realize it. I loved at acting at a very young age and told everyone I was going to be an actress and I wrote poetry all the time from about 5. Then I had very bad skin as a teenager and didn’t look the way I thought an actress should look. I had an incredibly beautiful mother was highly critical of me, she really looked like a movie star and would get stopped all the time as people thought she was Princess Grace (Kelly) and I was like the dark beast next to her. Although from a privileged background I was extremely isolated and very badly bullied at school which resulted in the kind of grand loneliness that only results in permanently living in my imagination. I was madly influenced by classic cinema. So I sort of acted out my poems which were often about the characters in the films I loved.

I saw everything in movie terms, I still do that, I remember I had sing along with Michael Jackson “Rock with me” and I got pretty good at imitating his croon on it. Then I went into my own little fantasy world and sing song my words and I heard music when I did this and the music I heard in my head was always about illustrating the feelings and atmosphere of my words and the scenario they described, it was always the words first.

At the beginning I had an idea of how the words could be stretched and sung and I wanted the notes to tell story. I always sort of became the character in the poem when I sung, so that is really performance art that changing character thing from song to song.
I saw Chrissie Hynde on Top Of The Pops and saw she had acne, but no one cared, so that kind of encouraged me greatly and certainly the idea of wearing whatever I wanted and looking amazing (I had continual fights with my mother who dressed me in frumpy fake Chanel suits as a teen to look like a mini her at 52 and wouldn’t allow me to wear black) and the idea of becoming a rock star to revenge the “mean girls” seemed very appealing to me. Somewhere in there I heard “Bugger takes pride” by Crass and that changed me. Kate Bush, the Top of the Pops thing was very early on, very quickly it was only music for music’s sake that enthralled me and I thought commercial music was a bit cheesy. Thus I sought out things that seemed raw, dangerous and told me stories of places and experiences I hadn’t had but wanted to. Music was the drug that transported my mood from suicidal to euphoric. I got so swept up in the The Doors and David Bowie, they literally saved my life. I became obsessed with sounds and their meaning that certain chords evoke emotions whether we want them to or not. I heard music in my head all the time by my late teens, suddenly I could pretty much sing everything and anything, I did jazz gigs and anything I could get. Unfortunately I smoked from 13 and totally fucked my voice in terms of what it used to be capable of, but in my teens and twenties before I had operations for nodes and could sing really loudly.
I left my husband in my thirties and went to New York with a reduced capability voice and started THE CUNT ROCK REVOLUTION, based on random’ s coincidence. Living my life by this discipline gave me adventures and got rid of a lot of fear for me. I found great musicians and lived my ultimate dreams. The shows were designed by me, sets, costumes, cast, just exploring the shit in my head and reflecting back the culture I was seeing the “infinite barbie…repeated in the media, the depiction of woman”, the quickening of information and stupidity. I radically changed my appearance from week to week, becoming unrecognizable, I found amazing musicians willing to work with me. Michel Auder who had been Cindy Sherman’s husband became my big fan and saw the parallel in our work, he was one of the first people who said what you do is “high performance art” and you should be in a gallery. Then all the artists I always read about started to come to shows and said the same. It was like finding a tribe. My muse was Brian Ermanski the street artist who was my neighbor and the painter Nicole Wittenberg who did the lights. I had very lovely friends some were legends like Peter Beard and with their encouragement I just expanded my creativity and stopped being so scared of stretching myself and experimenting. I found I could tell stories in lots of other disciplines, photography (I take all the work on my laptop I’m the most punk rock lo-fi person ever) and the photos won a small award. Then I started to make videos on my laptop and no one believed I had done them on the photo-booth application and I found that the movies I had in my head could work just the same and sometimes even look like expensive film grade. I got lucky and found the best editor in Jerome Raim, a 20 year old who smokes a lot of weed and was brought up on surrealist French film, we have some kind of easiness that makes doing work effortless. It works like that for me in music too, I write best with Phil Painson “Not waving but drowning”, we just get on the same wavelength and songs write themselves.
I think my fight is always about overcoming the anxiety of my own issues about failure and just summoning the courage to do the things I hear and see in my head. People think I’m fearless and confident when actually I’m the opposite: I’m always just daring myself and that looks like courage from the outside, when it’s really just fear turned inside out. A lot of the time I think I’m being brave but I think I might just being stupid!”

Alex Zapak aka The Countess

Rock punk suggestions, indipendence and revolution are the main ingredients of your work?

“Themes of my work are rooted in punk rock, in that punk which was the last cunt rock revolution, in punk your ideas were much more important than what you looked like and now everybody wants to look like an advert for something. I liked the diy ideals in punk, the singing your song anyway before you die, whether anyone ever hears or sees it. There’s an honesty to it like all those old amazing R & B records made by Afro-Americans who had day jobs and lived lives of poverty, but put their life into one recording and made some of the most moving records ever made, just for the hell of it, just to do it because what they felt it in their hearts.
I’ m about narrating story that to me is what I am here to do.
I’m influenced by the situationists way of seeing the absurdity of life, just as punk was, but I’m also influenced by novels, movies, stories and all kinds of music. I’m playing Fela Kuti all the time at the moment, he was such a master and had such passion in his beliefs.
I’m so techno shabby I feel cast adrift in this age of digital apartheid like someone who is not cut out for this age, made redundant like the “Misfits” in the John Huston film.
“We are the last of the wild life” is the continual theme of this work, I just want to leave a record of what it felt like to be me and alive now to show and share what my eyes saw. …
I really believe we now live in a culture that is set up to scare and control people like farm animals in a factory farm, battery hen and sheeps. We are all so estranged from our own imaginations by being bombarded with specular mania which ignores the power of the mythic story, of characters that make myths, metaphysical communication that we have always held with the earth through our imagination. I’m totally Joseph Campbell inspired with a punk rock approach. I’m not into divisive ideology, culture is only stays, the stories we tell each other about what it feels like to be a human being and make sense of the world.

I love beautiful things and fall for the fairytales of advertising and packaging in fashion and beauty the same as anyone, but I worry about it, I worry that I am becoming sluggish, stupid and a sucker. Fairytail Punk is about a longing to return to the connection with nature that I enjoyed as a child with a horse and how through self hatred that was fractured when I strove to become accepted by the outside world. It’s about ghosts of our communal psyche, it’s about knowing that the first thing you want is the last thing you should have. It’s about self-destruction and connection, it’s about how progress seems to be an endless story of cowboys and Indians, land and culture taken over by the next version of the cowboys looking to exploit and make more money for themselves, natives and aliens, cowboys and Indians”.

Alex Zapak aka The Countess

What are your forthcoming projects?

“I founded Bankofimaginationstheatre.com a pop up arts, theatre, film, music, surrealist event company, the painter Carlo Zeneone is now the managing director. thus I’m very excited because we have the same vision, but he is far more organized and will help me make things get into production.
In fact he’s getting my Bank of imaginations Theatre more funding and when that is there I’ve got more movies and shows to make and perform in the episodic project Fairytail Punk, including artistic and musical collaborations in Fairytail Punk with Penny Arcade, Kris Bones (from Gemnocide 11), and artists as Duggie Fields, Nicole Wittenberg, Daisy Delaney, Harland Miller’s children, Ava and Blake Miller who play my children in the film and a bunch of snarling 13 year olds as my punk rock chorus. I’ m very excited, it’s Summer and I’m liking England for the first time in years.

I’ll also be doing the show “I fancy bastards” very soon, trying to make sense of my disasterous taste in the opposite sex.

“Fairytail punk” 4 part musical radio play, “Fairytail Punk” short story is being published, “Spy in the house of love” and “I fancy bastards” photo books will be available on my website. I’m reforming CUNT ROCK REVOLUTION right now in London, who knows what characters will take part in this incarnation, past members have included everyone I met in a kebab shop on the Edware Road, then everyone I met at the Pink Poney on Ludlowe street in New York as Brian Jackson of Gil Scott Heron fame, Stanley F. Banks from George Benson’s band, random waitresses and the now rising burlesque star Miss Amelia(Kalman ). I may cast like I did for cunt rock by coincidence, using a static place like Bar italia in Soho or somewhere in the East end where the vibes are strong. Nevertheless I keep seeing these very cool gang Ethiopian girls on Portobello road, the area where I live, they make vegan food and call themselves the “queens of sheba”, they could be just the right vibe for new Cunt Rock Revolution members. Who knows, I’ll keep you posted, who knows, everyday I think something new could work and I will have to just see what sticks, I know there are always extraordinary people right outside my door walking past everyday and it feels like it ‘s going to be another adventure”.